Having been in the vanguard of men’s grooming products for nearly 21 years (click this link to see our history/back catalogue of products) and at Target since 2000, it was ‘gut-wrenching’ when as part of our ill-fated distribution dalliance with Remington we were de-listed.

But that was then, and this is NOW! My three favourite King of Shaves products, AlphaOil, AlphaGel and Hyperglide are available at 200 Target stores (more coming later this year, hopes!) and of course on-line at Target.com.

Within the next few months, we will also have our shave.com site optimised both for ecommerce & subscription in the USA as well as the UK, with all the benefits that go with that.

Congratulations to Lee and our US team on getting us up and running with my favourite US mass-channel retailer.

And the best bit for hard hit US consumers is that a pack of 6 Azor 5 EnduriumNano replacement cartridges is just $11.99 (or less) versus expensive Gillette Fusion ProGlide replacement cartridges, at $22+

Shave AND Save with King of Shaves | Remington.

Honestly. Seriously. King of Shaves IS the King of Shaves in the USA, and with our roll-out into stores across the USA coming in the Fall, we’re looking forward to shaving America better, forever with King of Shaves in partnership with Remington.

The King of Shaves USA Facebook fanpage is here if you wish to ‘Like’ us in America!

I write this from NYC, where I’m delighted to be a guest at Diane Woods’ (our very own Queen of Shaves) wedding today in New Jersey. Sadly, the weather’s a little British (read raining cats and dogs) but it promises to be a fantastic day for Di – for whom the sun will certainly shine on her and her partner, Steve in the future (and definitely where they’re going on their Honeymoon!)

Awaking, I was delighted to read coverage in The Sunday Telegraph on not just our recent deal with Kai Industries Co. Ltd. of Japan, our technology partner (Kai is a £700m revenues company headquartered in Tokyo) but also a nice write up on our stylish, brand new Precision Grooming range developed in partnership with the Remington division of US $3Bn consumer products company, Spectrum brands.

This is the first time we’ve taken ‘The King’ into the arena of men’s hairstyling & grooming, and we launched the range with Argos earlier this month. It’s available in over 700 stores, and will bring King of Shaves to a wider audience. Of course, we have more planned – both in this area, and in our core wet shave arena in terms of NPD – indeed, one person tweeted today that he saw King of Shaves “as the dyson of shaving” which pleased me greatly!

Before I flew to the USA, my Dad chastised me gently for not updating my blog more frequently – I tend to twitter and post on facebook, both of which he doesn’t particularly engage with. So I hope readers (and Dad!) enjoy reading this latest blog post.

It’s an exciting time for us, having entered the hyper competitive wet shave market with our King of Shaves Azor 4 in June 2008, and more recently launching our Azor 5 Sensitive in the UK, and shortly in the USA (yes, King of Shaves AlphaGels and Azor will be available much more widely in the USA in the Fall, as announced by Dave Lumley the CEO of Spectrum Brands Inc. (SBI) in their recent Q3 Earnings Call.

The King of Shaves Company continues to attract much interest from a wide variety of parties, looking to work with us on expanding our global reach – after all – in high performance system wet shave (an intensely challenging category, with high barriers to entry (patents) and potentially enormous commercial profitability (Gillette was bought for US$57Bn by P&G in 2005) I’m excited that King of Shaves is the only other high performance brand in this space, other than Gillette & Schick Wilkinson Sword – that’s right – just THREE companies, and ‘The British Are Coming’!

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll try to update my blog here, and my Brand Royalty blog more frequently – Dad (and Penny) if I don’t, keep on at me.

On Sunday, we uploaded our parody of The King’s Speech onto YouTube, which has gone down a storm world-wide, becoming the 4th most ret-weeted/shared link on Sunday night in the USA, according to zocial.tv, and which now has over 6,000+ views and has been written up by a number of influential blog sites as ‘The’ way to do social media ‘smarketing‘ as I call it.

On Monday, less than 24 hours later – and in advance of Steve Jobs’ debuting Apples new iPad2, I launched our new King of Shaves iPhone app to the 150+ audience at smartaLIVE – a group of upcoming entrepreneurs, knowledge catalysts and forward thinkers. It’s a very KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) free app, that allows you to 1) Get a free King of Shaves Azor 4 XP razor, 2) Order our Azor Endurium cartridges at a significant discount to the UK RRP, and get them delivered to your door (over £30 can be saved when compared to ordering the equivalent number of Gillette ProGlide cartridges) and 3) It connects you into our Kingdom of Social Media, via links to our Facebook fanpage, our YouTube twitter account and my Twitter feed. It’s already picking up very nice reviews indeed!

Today, our new Azor 5 debuted in-store in Tesco (2 weeks early – they are very quick off the mark) along with our latest in shaving software, the SuperGel – more details on this coming soon. All in all, a most excellent week – despite Gillette spending squillions on ‘tugging and pulling’ people towards the hyper-expensive Fusion ProGlide, our sales are standing up well, and have grown over the past few weeks.

I’m off for a few days R&R next week, back on the UK Shave Grid w/c 14 March, but will be ‘tweetdecking’ off a ‘yacht deck’ next week, as I continue to plan out the continuing globalisation of King of Shaves.

Big respect to our partners in the USA too, Spectrum Brands (Remington) – they’ve had some most excellent news this week with regard to our King of Shaves launch there…

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Learn more about the King of Shaves range of shaving and skincare products for men and women at shave.com. Shop online at our secure store. The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The King of Shaves Company Ltd. By viewing and interacting with this blog you agree to our terms of use. E&OE.